By Sandy Myhre

The notion of train travel as romantic still exists. Indeed, modern and swift train travel is gaining ground, if you’ll pardon the pun and, given the lengthy pre-take-off wait at airports, often more time efficient.

It’s at least an hour from most places in London to Heathrow, usually more. Then there’s a two-hour wait before boarding a plane after your luggage has been taken away from you and all for just an hour’s flight to the Continent. It’s a legacy of these post-9/11 times, but add that to the inevitability of a city struggle getting to your destination at the other end, and one surely has to question if it’s worth it.

By comparison, on the Eurostar you can turn up just under an hour before take-off and keep your luggage with you. The journey through the Channel Tunnel takes two hours fifteen minutes from the heart of London to the centre of Paris and since few planes heading to the Continent offer first class dining facilities, why would you not take the terrestrial option?

The sheer engineering feat of the Channel Tunnel is fascination itself. The idea, in fact, dates back to Napoleon who apparently first suggested such a thing in 1802 and two centuries later digging began. The volume of rubble removed from the tunnel is three times greater than that of the Cheops Pyramid in Egypt and, at a cost of $15 billion, one of Europe’s biggest infrastructure projects. Dug by a workforce of nearly 13,000, it was officially opened by President Mitterand of France and HRH Queen Elizabeth II in 1994.

There is one tunnel, but with three interconnected tubes, one rail track each way and one service tunnel. Its length is 50 kilometres, 37 of which are underwater, at an average depth of 45 metres, and only 20 minutes of the Eurostar journey actually takes place under the Channel. A new and higher-speed link was opened in 2007 and the English home port was moved from Waterloo to St Pancras.

The magnificent St Pancras station (just two stops from Oxford Circus and Covent Garden) was originally built over 140 years ago by the Midland Railway Company and remains one of Britain’s most palatial stations. At the time it was built, the cavernous cast-iron train shed was the widest single-span structure in the world and dubbed the ‘cathedral of the railways’ with the soaring roof dwarfing every other London station.

It is still a magnificent structure, even with the refurbishment to cater for Eurostar, and lays claim to hosting the longest champagne bar in Europe. As one quaffs Bolly, darling, trains glide in alongside.

These are bald facts but what is less tangible is the atmosphere train travel induces. A subtle intellectual knowing seems to exist among fellow passengers that, at once we are heading towards progress yet, at the same time, stepping back in time as a rhythmically muted clackity-clack whooshes us onwards. It is contemporaneously soporific and exhilarating and a sensation that simply cannot be generated by other forms of commercial travel. 

It’s worth going first class on the Eurostar for a very small premium. The waiter actually has a personality. Ours was from Belgium and she was genuinely interested in where we were from. “Really?” she asks. “I long to go there,” and we believed her. The food is quintessentially French and faux champagne doesn’t make the list. Indeed, table service bypasses waddling down to the dining car.

There is a greater degree of camaraderie on trains, perhaps because we all think we’re smarter than airline passengers because we’ve taken the more enjoyable option. The family from Brussels, the Nigerian from Lagos, the French Canadian who didn’t want to speak English but was persuaded by the ambience, Italians, Swiss, English; we are all gently swayed by a binding, agreeable togetherness from London to Lille, Bruges to Biarritz, Namur to Nice.  

There is not, in fact, a great deal to see on the journey between London and Paris, other than flat farmland either side which whirrs past in a 300 km per hour blur. The main tunnel is for reading or dozing.

It is, in a word, relaxing, like that dream-like state after a night’s sleep, when you know you’re partly awake and want to savour it for just a few more minutes. But wake one must, to the cavernous stretches of Gare du Nord platforms (which are somewhat utilitarian compared to St Pancras) and which softly glide by the window. A summery Paris awaits.

There are other trains that produce the languid disposition induced on the Eurostar, and the highly efficient TGV (train a grande vitesse) contributes to the European experience.  

The inaugural TGV service commenced between Paris and Lyon in 1981 and the network, which is centred on Paris, has expanded to connect cities across France and other neighbouring countries.

The TGV holds the record for the fastest wheeled train journey at 574.8 km per hour in April 2007 and the record for the world’s highest average speed for a regular passenger service. It’s clearly fast and very efficient, not quite to the standard of Eurostar perhaps, but neither is flying between cities of the same standard as flying internationally. It’s still remarkably comfortable nonetheless and the seats are wider, and the foot space more generous than on any airline outside of first class.

The TGV whisks a distance of just over 500 kilometres from Montparnasse to Bordeaux in just under three hours and if the journey’s fast, somehow one can still see farms and fauna on the plains, sheds and chateaux nestled in the woods; they do not meld into the landscape as a gigantic brushstroke on a rural canvass, as one expected at such speeds. 

Most TGV trains have mobile phone silence areas and woe betide anyone who ignores the rule. Fellow passengers think nothing of pointing to the sign aloft and glaring at the perpetrator. It works.

A number of people on the journey used the table between seats as a work station to conduct business meetings with colleagues. Tourists, however, are happy to chat. A collective, if unwritten, friendliness surfaces like an international conference of goodwill cohesively bound by the very tracks beneath our feet.

The fact our carbon print is self-satisfyingly significantly smaller than with air travel may have something to do with it, but it’s so much easier to smile at a fellow traveller on a train than on a plane. Some seats face each other.

And so to journey’s end into the heart of the Bordeaux where there are chateaux to visit and there is wine to be supped. We could have gone on to Montpellier, but perhaps another time and, God willing, very soon.

And it can all be done before leaving home. It only takes a visit to Rail Plus www.railplus.co.nz to arrange all the bookings on every train imaginable, now our imagination has been activated.